Thesis full text PDF - Politecnico di Milano

development, nor as easy as old-school web development. On the other hand, the fact that AJAXdevelopment embraces so many different technologies makes it a lot more interesting. Here’s abrief listing of the technologies that work together to make an AJAX web application:HTML/XHTMLHTTP, CGI, Form SubmissionXMLthe W3C DOMCSSXMLHttpRequestJavaScriptServer-Side ScriptingEvent model ("DHTML")Web RemotingHTML/XHTMLHTML provides the structure of a web page. An Ajax App uses an HTML document to show theinitial page, and the document is continuously manipulated to change the display and set up newevents. Where possible, its XML-compliant variant, XHTML, should be used in order to makemanipulation more robust.HTTP, CGI, Form SubmissionAs with conventional web applications, Ajax communicates via HTTP. The difference is thatinstead of returning full pages, the server returns concise results that are then processed in thebrowser script. Form submission often with CGI-style URLs is also used, but again is initiatedprogrammatically, meaning that no page refresh need take place.Data Exchange and Markup: XMLXML is where AJAX gets its letter “X”. XML often serves as the main data format used in theasynchronous HTTP requests that communicate between the browser and the server in an AJAXapplication. This role plays to XML’s strengths as a neutral and fairly simple data exchangeformat, and also means that it’s relatively easy to reuse or reformat content if the need arises.There are, of course, numerous other ways to format your data for easy exchange between thebrowser and the server but XML is one of the most common.XML as MarkupThe web pages in AJAX applications consist of XHTML markup, which is actually just a flavor ofXML. XHTML, as the successor to HTML, is very similar to it. It’s easily picked up by any11